​My current project, “Flows of Work and Song: Migration and Agrarian Struggle Across Japan's Sugar Empire," examines agrarian struggles that sugar producers from Okinawa prefecture waged throughout the Japanese empire and beyond. It seeks to understand how experiences and memories of struggles against global large sugar capital – Japanese or not – were carried, translated, mobilized and performed from one context to the next by tracing the inter-connectedness of various forms of agrarian struggle that linked sugar cultivators who worked as agricultural laborers in Okinawa, Hawaii, Taiwan, Indonesia, the South Seas islands and the Philippines. Initial stages of research was funded by a Fulbright research grant.

Faculty Courses Taught

Name

Title

Description

AST-470

Seminar in Asian Studies

FYS-1178

Okinawa:Farm,Fortress,Fantasy

Exploring the relationship between history and memory, through the context of modern Okinawa. Challenging the protrayal of Okinawa as a simple tragedy, and pondering the consequences of the acceptance of this type of narrative of victimization. Students will participate in the construction a virtual tour of the Cornerstone of Peace, a site commemorating those who died during the Battle of Okinawa.

HST-161

Ancient and Early Japan

Survey of Japan from its prehistoric origins to the early 17th century. Topics include: archaeology and history, origins of Japan

HST-162

Modern Japan

Survey of Japan from the 16th century to the present. Topics include: Tokugawa societies and cultures, economic systems, Imperial Japan and world wars, global interactions, modernity and modernization, and contemporary Japanese issue.

HST-262

Jpn Soc Mvmnt During Cold War

This course examines the development of Japanese social movements from the 1950s through the late 1980s, focusing on anti-American and anti-ruling party movements that prioritized local autonomy, social justice and environmental sustainability over the mobilization of people and resources to aid the Cold War in Asia. Focus is also placed on the ways in which the history of these turbulent times have been told, and the political consequences of competing narratives.

"Expansion of the Japanese Empire and the Rise of the Global Agrarian Question," in Cataclysm: 1914: World War I and the Making of Modern World Politics, edited by Alexander Aneivas (Historical Materialism Series) (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, forthcoming in late 2014)

"Uno Kozo's Analysis of the Agrarian Question, Post-World War One Okinawa's Small Producers, and Prospects for Revolutionary Subjectivity" (in progress)

"Kawakami Hajime's 'Discovery' of Okinawa in the Late Meiji Period" (in progress)

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